“Perfect Symmetry” was the third album by Keane [1], and it marked a change in the music of Keane, by moving away from the Coldplay-style piano ballads they originally became famous for to a more dance pop oriented sound. In general, this change simply seems stylistic, as bands tend to like to expand their sound after a while to stay fresh, adding or subtracting instrumentation, shifting to a more arena friendly sound, or something of that kind. What we see with Keane is a desire to keep their material fresh, add the hint of guitars, and make at least some of their music appealing on the dance floor. We get the same sort of melancholy, though, that one would expect from a Keane album. As usual, here is a track-by-track review:

Spiralling – The album opens with a dark Pygmalion tale of a man giving everything to a particularly and spectacularly ungrateful woman. This is the sort of song that a lot of people can relate to. I imagine if rock stars tend to feel this way about their unsuccessful attempts at romancing gold diggers. It’s a melancholy thought.

The Lovers Are Losing – I can relate to this song a bit painfully well, as it definitely has related to my own life at times. The narrator sings about nightmares and the desire to rearrange the pieces of the dream into something better, but it looks bad no matter how one looks at it. The lyrics are phrased a bit awkwardly, particularly in the chorus, but it suits the song material well.

Better Than This – This song continues the general melancholy mood of the album with a deeply critical song where the narrator tells himself and someone else that they could do so much better than this, not that it helps [2]. The general instrumentation of this song sounds a bit like a clown’s nightmare, which makes perfect sense in context of a song about intense dissatisfaction.

You Haven’t Told Me Anything – This immensely danceable track is another intensely critical song that also contains a great deal of self-criticism, where the narrator sings about the frustration of hearing a lot of negativity in a broken life where the person already knows everything critical and negative that others are telling them. This is yet another song about the frustration of feeling stuck in a rut and not going anywhere.

Perfect Symmetry – This song is the most like the usual synthpop style of Keane’s previous work, and it was an obvious single off of this album. With it’s cold synth it continues the general mood of the album with an almost voyeuristic interest in the pointlessness of life. Ironically, the song seems to present a viewpoint of life as karmic, and pitilessly just. Clearly, there is an absence of hope here, and more gloomy reflection on being stuck in a rut and the fruitless search for love [3].

You Don’t See Me – This beautiful and haunting ballad is one that I would like to turn into a time-lapsed music video where someone slowly moves through life while everyone around is entirely oblivious to them and rushing about on their business. This song is another melancholy song about caring deeply and paying attention to someone who simply does not want to recognize one’s existence and communicate at all.

Again And Again – This song is a fast-paced but still mopey song about someone speaking in ways that are dishonest and manipulative without caring about the damage they cause to the sensitive soul of the narrator. The song is yet another on this album that talks about frustrated hopes and expectations and going over the same unsatisfactory terrain again and again.

Playing Along – This moody and mostly slow-tempo song is an almost anthemic ode to faking one’s way through life and trying to drown out the sorrow and frustration of life with loud music, appropriately getting louder at some points to demonstrate. The general mood here is one of cynicism towards heroism with a sort of droning melody ending in a chaotic conclusion.

Pretend That You’re Alone – This is another song about pretense, where the narrator attempts to comfort himself with thoughts about evolution and the efforts of his own imagination and the absence of morality. Despite the uptempo music, and the decadent 80’s style beat, the song itself seems rather gloomy and despairing. It is almost as the narrator is desiring to eat and drink and trying to find an escape from life.

Black Burning Heart – This gloomy song reflects on death and blood and isolation and the desire for intimacy despite the extreme pessimism that the narrator feels about life. The author thinks that his memorial will be nothing more than a cenotaph of cloud and that every day is a false start [4]. Even some lovely spoken French cannot deliver this sophisticated piece of midtempo dance pop from extreme gloominess.

Love Is The End – This moody piano ballad, with a somewhat creepy theremin part reflects on life after death, and on the desire for a love to preserve a hope of life even as the narrator seems despondent, without hope whatsoever. The author just trudges along a road he knows goes nowhere in particular, but sings without any sort of joy in the process, except for a sort of desperate longing for genuine love.

As an album, “Perfect Symmetry” has the style of 80’s synth pop, with its disposable “unleaded” sound, but the often upbeat rhythm and music hides an album that is intensely gloomy and morose, almost devoid of hope, with a consistent refrain that the only thing that makes life worth living is love, even if the narrator focuses a bit too exclusively on romantic love in the absence of any kind of hope in divine justice or aid from God in living a better life that is less pointless and more joyous. Still, this album is almost clinical in its portrayal of a life lived without ultimate hope, and it’s not a pretty picture.

[1] See also:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/03/19/album-review-hopes-fears/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/03/27/album-review-under-the-iron-sea/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2015/05/03/album-review-night-train/

[2] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/01/19/you-could-do-so-much-better-than-this/

[3] https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/02/12/i-dream-in-e-mails-worn-out-phrases-mile-after-mile-of-just-empty-pages/

[4] See, for example:

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2013/10/23/a-cenotaph-of-fog/

https://edgeinducedcohesion.wordpress.com/2014/01/02/every-day-a-false-start/